a blog about making bread at home

Archive for the tag “chocolate”

Recipe from Dan’ Lepard’s Short and Sweet, also available here, but use 3 eggs not 4. A flour free recipe,

A cake that is mostly made in a saucepan goes slightly against the grain, but makes it all pretty easy. You don’t need an electric mixer for the egg white whipping bit, a firm arm with a hand whisk will do the job quite nicely.

I found it took a lot longer to bake than the 40 minutes suggested, and I gave it 55 in the end, but it might have needed a bit more. My eggs were from a mixed box, not the medium ones stated, so maybe that affected the cooking time.

It does shrink down quite a bit after baking and I didn’t use the cream topping suggested. Here’s some pics, and it was rather tasty.

I think my scales are on the blink! Had a bit of a ‘mare with these, because the scales were being freaky and not weighing properly, this is the second time they’ve been a bit off, so I have condemned them to the bin. But despite some gross inaccuracies on the measuring front I have emerged with something edible and promise to make them properly next time.

A very quick and easy Dan Lepard recipe available over here or in Short and Sweet. Easy cakey/biscuity munchies that can be made if you don’t have eggs and are mostly stuff you’ve got in the cupboard. Flour, baking powder, cocoa, chocolate, nuts, condensed milk (and you get to use a whole tin or so), butter, and a spoon of cinnamon. The topping is more chocolate, butter, condensed milk, boiling water and marshmallows.

I ran out of dark chocolate so used some cheap milk chocolate that was in the cupboard and surprisingly it all worked OK. I think it would be nice to play about with some sour cherries, big raisins, apricots and whatnot in the mix too.

At this time of year the veg boxes that Riverford Organics deliver tend to have beetroot in them. I’m OK with beetroot, but the rest of the household aren’t that keen. So being, mostly, a good mummy I thought I’d try to find a cake recipe with beetroot in that they’d accept.

A community recipe on Nigella’s website – which needed cream for the topping which I didn’t have.

BBC Good Food – 100g of cocoa and 100g of chocolate – well no wonder you can’t taste the beetroot!

Then I found one for cupcakes on the goodtoknow website and thought that would do the business. Being somewhat risk averse in the kitchen I did a half measure for the first attempt, and it made 7 cakes. I also didn’t bother with quite so much topping, I had about a tablespoon of mascapone cheese and gave that a beating with some icing sugar and vanilla extract. Result – without telling the offspring, he snaffled 4 of the 7 cakes over the next couple of days. He did say it was too much chocolate so I will be reducing the cocoa content in the next attempt, and balancing with extra flour.

So for version two we have sifted plain flour, cocoa, caster sugar and some baking powder

Then you whizz the beetroot, eggs, oil and vanilla – I only have a stick blender and that was OK, and not all of it went up the wall!

And then mix with the dry goods – it was quite a firm mix for me,

but it baked out evenly.

Today topped off with some icing sugar, butter, orange flavouring and colour and some chocolate curls

The offspring has eaten one and says it is OK. (Damned by faint praise!)

Haven’t we all said that and apparently although Burton’s say it is to do with the size of our hands getting bigger, not their snacks getting smaller. As with many snack foods the apparently the sizes vary in different countries – my how we laughed when we encountered a six-finger Kit-Kat in the USA a few years ago.

But it’s my husband’s birthday, so as a special treat I have hunted down a recipe for do-it-yourself Wagon Wheels – thank you to Kitsch in the kitchen for a recipe. And supersized them by using the largest round biscuit cutter we had. I used Galaxy chocolate for the coating and some home-made raspberry jam in the middle with the marshmallows. The bit with the marshmallows went a bit sticky, so there’s no pictures of the making, just the finished results. Picture below shows one ginormous biscuit, a ‘real’ Burton’s biscuit for comparison – you can almost see through the chocolate flavour coating on that one and a few small ones that I made.

As part of my New Year’s resolution to explore further bits of cookery books I already own, this afternoon I hit upon Dan Lepard’s chocolate custard muffins. The recipe is available online here. Unusually for any sort of cake recipe you start by making a chocolate ‘custard’ with water, cornflour, cocoa and sugar. When it’s nice a thick you add butter and chocolate, then when that’s melted in the rest of the ingredients, finishing with flour and raising agents. Which all goes totally against everything I know about making cake, but hey I’m open to ideas.

I made 12 muffin sized and 8 smaller ‘fairy cake’ sized cakes. Dan says to put icing on the top but that could be a bit much, so I may leave them plain.

Earlier this week I made some chocolate and orange muffins from a muffin recipe book – sorry they went so fast I couldn’t even photograph them and to me that recipe has a tang of the raising agent. These don’t and are rather lovely and squidgy.

And the bikes … I have a place in the inaugural Prudential London-Surrey 100 mile ride in August this year, so the next 6 months will be all about the bike, but I’ll need plenty of fuel on the way. Let’s see how the Olympic legacy works!

My NY resolution for 2013 is not to buy any more cookery books, but to explore further the ones I already have and to revisit older favourite recipes that I may not have made for a while. Now the last bit of slightly stale Panettone and hardened Christmas cake has been eaten I can start 2013 baking. Yipee! Much as I love seasonal baking, I do like making things regularly and I haven’t baked anything except bread since before Christmas Eve.

To kick off 2013 today I made Chocolate Coconut Chunks from Pat Ring’s Cake, which was the last cookery book I bought towards the end of 2012. This is an excellent recipe for using up relatively small quantities of a large number of ingredients you may have lurking in your cupboards, plus a bit of butter, an egg and some milk in the topping. Without giving away quantities, you’ll have to get the book if you want to make this, there is: butter, walnuts, plain flour, baking powder, soft brown sugar, dessicated coconut, cocoa, sultanas, Weetabix (the secret ingredient), egg, vanilla extract. The topping is meant to be milk chocolate, butter, milk and icing sugar, sprinkled with more coconut. I didn’t have any milk chocolate (well the child wouldn’t sacrifice some of his bar) so made do with plain (which I generally prefer to Cadbury’s any day). I used an 8 inch square tin to bake it and that was fine, and cut it into 16 pieces. Using MyFitnessPal‘s data I calculated each piece contains about 260 calories.

As you can see from the picture, this bake has a slightly chunky texture, a bit like flapjack. The nuts and fruit makes for a treat that you can’t just swallow down without chewing. Yes, I have had cake that you don’t need to chew and there’s a time and place for everything and early in the year when we’re getting over Christmas excess by reducing calories I think you need to chew everything thoroughly and make sure you get every bit of flavour and texture out of your food. We can get to cake you don’t need to chew later in the year!